Authorship
The tendency of famous persons to attract to themselves events, deeds, or witty sayings, is part of the dynamic of cultures everywhere.
Leo C Rosten, in a speech at a Masquers' Club dinner on 16 February 1939, said of the curmudgeonly W C Fields, "Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad." This is memorable because it is funny, and it is funny because it sums up Fields' comic persona in a single line. In time, the line came to be not only associated with Fields, but attributed to him. Inspection will show that the line is far more likely to have been said of Fields than by him, but that avails precisely nothing against the fact that W C Fields is much better known than Leo C Rosten, and is growing more so with with every passing year.
Such tendencies of drift are part of the general process of mythic development. Most figures prominent enough to survive at all, in the self-perception of a culture, are subject to that process. The result is to reconfigure the untidy world of the past into a form more acceptable to the larger public.
Add to this the tendency of some ancient cultures to offer new ideas not over an author's signature, but under the aegis of an established name, and it follows that authorship is one of the last questions that should be asked of a text under study. In the case of an ancient text, it is also one of the questions that is least likely to have a convincing answer.
There are reasonably dependable signs of authorship as well as of non-authorship. Examples of them are gathered below. Note that an author is not the only imaginable text-producing creature. Enterprises also generate writing, among them the heads of schools or religious movements. In a faceless organization such as that of the Micians of pre-Imperial China, the school identification may be all the authorship indication we can ever have. In these cases, the real attribution is to a period rather than a person; see Date.
Contents
- Discoverable Authorship
- Example
- Proprietorship
- Example
- Unlikely Authorship
- Copa Surisca
- Li Ching-jau
- The Emperor Constantine
- Reattribution
- Tang Poetry Anthologies
- Aegis Situations
- Gwan Jung
- Concealed Authorship
- Junius
- The Nonexistent Author
- The Public Man
- Lieutenant Kije
- Stylistic Discrimination
- Hamilton and Madison
- Thurber and White
- Lord Shang
Philology is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce Brooks
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